China in 1995

The Economy

Underlying the political dynamics of contemporary China and posing difficult policy choices for the country’s leaders were the immense economic and social changes that the Dengist era had produced. Many changes had been for the better. Even though the political system stifled open dissent, most Chinese enjoyed an unprecedented degree of personal mobility and freedom. The standard of living of most Chinese had improved substantially. The number of rural poor had declined from 200 million to 80 million in a decade. Fifteen years of rapid economic growth had transformed the face of urban and rural China, creating unprecedented prosperity for many while widening the gap between rich and poor. The continuing influx of tens of millions of rural Chinese into coastal and interior boom towns in search of employment and a better life followed the pattern of other less developed countries. Such migrants overburdened municipal services, drove up the crime rate, and contributed to a growing sense of social disorder that had translated into support for leaders who promised stability at any price. Among other negative phenomena was the growing illegal drug problem. A burgeoning trade in heroin, manufactured from opium poppies in Myanmar (Burma), had entered the world market via southwestern China. Rising rates of addiction plagued Yunnan and Guizhou provinces. Drug use was growing among young urban sophisticates. As elsewhere, violent crime accompanied the drug trade. A commodity culture heavily influenced by the West, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan was supplanting values associated with communitarian socialism.

China’s economy remained a hybrid in which thriving capitalist limbs had been grafted onto an anemic state socialist body. At its Fifth Plenum in September, the party’s Central Committee ratified the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1996-2000), which envisioned an 8-9% growth rate. In recent years China’s growth, most of it outside the state sector, had exceeded government estimates, although the five-year projection was almost identical with the 8.9% rate achieved during the first three quarters of 1995. Viewing balanced growth as the key to achieving social and political stability, the CPC endorsed economic reform and underscored the importance of the electronics, petrochemical, motor vehicle, machinery, and building materials industries. Again no solution was offered to the perennial problem of heavily subsidized and debt-ridden state enterprises that continued to employ the majority of China’s industrial workers. China’s state-dominated banking industry had to absorb the annual loss of billions of yuan in bad loans to insolvent state-owned enterprises, which were kept afloat for essentially political reasons. Understandably, no one in power was willing to risk the serious social instability that mass layoffs might entail. Moreover, because state-owned enterprises constituted the economic essence of state socialism, they also embodied the CPC’s resolve to prevent the final victory of a market economy with its concomitant threat to party rule.

Since gaining power in 1949, the CPC had had to face the nightmare of inflation, which had accelerated the downfall of its Nationalist predecessors. In 1995 inflation was cut nearly in half to just over 13% as China slowed the growth of its money supply. Now one of the world’s top trading nations, China enjoyed a $20.3 billion trade surplus through September, and its foreign-exchange reserves nearly doubled to $64.2 billion, the sixth highest in the world. Nevertheless, a number of economic problems continued to plague China’s relations with the industrialized world. In late February, after the U.S. and China had initiated trade sanctions against each other, China finally acceded to U.S. pressure by pledging to curb the rampant pirating of U.S. software and audio- and videocassettes. The ballooning of the U.S. trade deficit with China, projected to reach $38 billion in 1995 (according to U.S. statistics), further soured Sino-American relations, already strained by political factors. At the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in November, Beijing promised to slash import tariffs in 1996 by 30% on more than 4,000 kinds of imported goods as one concrete step toward the 25-year goal of an Asia-Pacific free-trade zone. The U.S.-led Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development stipulated further changes that China would have to undertake to secure admission to the World Trade Organization.

Rapid sustained economic growth had been the key to China’s coming of age as a global power. China continued to attract substantial foreign investment in 1995, with particular interest being shown in such massive infrastructural projects as energy, telecommunications, and highways. The U.S.-based auto giant General Motors received the coveted partnership it sought to develop a mass-produced people’s car. As work progressed on the approximately $30 billion Three Gorges Dam, the administration of U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton directed the U.S. Export-Import Bank to withhold financing for U.S. companies engaging in the project, widely criticized by Chinese as well as foreign environmentalists. On the whole, however, Chinese leaders were able to rely on their country’s enormous potential for investment, trade, and economic cooperation as an effective buffer against unwelcome intervention by foreign governments.

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